The Heat of a Fire
by adangeli
Summary: Sam is sometimes idea, sometimes memory. A Fire Collection story. Cover art by A Karswyll.


_**Author's Note: For this one I listened to To Be Alone by Hozier if you'd like a little background music.**_

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The sound of the helo blades over his head makes him think of war. This mission is so small-scale it doesn't exist but he can't shake the feeling.

Over the headset the young guys on his team are cracking jokes and snapping gum. He feels old and tired surrounded by six twenty-somethings talking about leave, videogames and pussy. He prefers covert, he prefers dark, and he prefers to work alone. Like nobody fucking cares what he prefers, the sun streams into the open sides of the full bird and lights up the gunmetal grey floor.

_Like the gunmetal grey of his sheets, one long, slim, creamy-colored leg with burgundy tipped toes tangled up in fabric, bare all the way to the hollow of her hipbone, sun slashing across her thigh making her skin hot to the touch, a peek of coarse, golden hair and wet pink when she shifts to accommodate the bulk of his body next to her._

Sam is sometimes idea, sometimes memory, but she's always the fuel in whichever motor that needs revving. This time it's getting home, but sometimes she's what makes him come once he's already there. These days he's got a catalogue in his head of the ways she sounds satisfied and it's enough to make him go hard and hungry in the eyes and young or not, around him, the guys know what that look means. But to them he's old and they assume he's married and that somewhere there's a cake-baking, blanket knitting housewife keeping the light on for him.

So he tells stories that are half true or almost true and include motorcycle leather and post-mission phone sex. He needs these guys to look at him like he's god and he needs them to watch his back if he ever wants to turn that phone sex into actual sex. Because, without a doubt and under the threat of her orgasmic voice, Sam will kill him if he gets dead.

_The hungry, needy sound of her moan when he talks about wiping her off his face, the way she tells him she can already taste him in her mouth and how she strokes his ego with words like long, thick and heavy, the way he knows she's right and she doesn't yet, the way she tells him how she'll fuck him out under the stars if he'll just finish the goddamned missions and get home, the way he likes how she says fuck like it's something she says every day._

The pilot sets the helo down in a wide-open field that feels too empty, too quiet, too prepared. The guys crouch/run behind him until they're not so exposed and they take ninety precious seconds to survey the lay of the land they already know and give silent directions they've already discussed. It should be an in and out.

It's not. There's precise gunfire and a few rapid bursts from automatic weapons. Two of his guys get shot then get back up. Sometimes he misses these spec ops boys, but nobody out here cares that he carries tissues in his vest pocket so he figures he'll stick with his day job.

_Her, soft hard body pressed up against the wallboard in his hallway, head thrown back, throat exposed, shirt unbuttoned and hanging off her arms, her hips pressing into him, his fingers inside her, her dripping down into the cup of his palm. _

He sneaks in between rounds of coverfire and dispatches another Earth-bound Goa'uld. Quick, precise, well placed hands, the snap of a neck and a perfectly placed pistol shot ensure the bastard isn't getting back up. Alien tech found and retrieved. Four more inconspicuous Jaffa laid down and then it's a slow, cocky strut back to the helo that he walks but doesn't feel. The young guys chatter like it's just another day, but they didn't just watch some alien motherfucker's eyes glow. Because spec ops is spec ops but there's still such a thing as too classified. Inside the bird, the youngest guy patches up the two bleeders and they're halfway back to base before Jack's brain catches up with the adrenaline shaking his hands.

Three mission-critical calls then someone tells him he's going to Budapest before he gets to go home. Half an hour later he's got her, separated from her throaty voice by five thousand miles and the light cotton of her bedsheets. She wraps her voice around his cock and for twenty minutes his world narrows to the two of them and how she can make him feel. When he asks her if she's wet she thinks he's asking for her but he's not. It's still all about him and it has to be. He doesn't have what it takes to be a good lover after what he's just done. He doesn't even let her believe the good things of him, and she doesn't seem to mind. When she comes, her orgasm is his and he likes the unsatisfied sort of satisfied sounds in her voice. Next time, stateside, he'll do it for her. This time he just tells her where to put her fingers and coaxes her to another shallow-but-bone-shattering orgasm because her letting him do that to her makes him feel like a man and not a machine.

Sometimes he misses the way it was before, when it hurt to be around her and things were needy in a different way, and urgent. But he likes the new way better, the way where he can call her and she'll tell him how she thinks it'll feel when she stretches her lips around him and laves the head of his cock with her tongue. He likes how she uses her words in between having none at all, and how she says his name like it's sharp in her mouth one moment, and then soft and wanting in the next.

He knows, when he's finally got her to forget herself so much she calls him "god...yes...sir", it's time to give her a break. She's hot and damp and achy and he wants to give her the opportunity to come in a way that makes the need stop but he's not going to be able to help her get to that so he'll do the mostly gentlemanly thing he's currently capable of and let her be alone with herself.

In the shower there's military-issue soap and it smells so much like her he touches himself again but it's slower, lazier, and with less purpose and intent. It's the way he thinks it would be with her after a long night of sex bleeds into the next morning.

In the morning he calls her and tells her he's not coming home and he hears the way she schools the irritation from her voice the way a wife never would and he's grateful to have hitched his wagon differently this time around. It's nice to know she wants him, might even think she needs him, but that she'll do what she's been taught and go about her business while he's gone. He can't do what he needs to if he's worried about her at home and hopefully alone. As always, she gives him what he needs and never asks for more than he can give. It's probably what makes him want to give to her so much when he's home and he can, even if he can't give her the one thing they both want - which is the two of them together, not even in bed just damn...together.

This is it, as good as it gets, at least for now and for the next long while. She knows that and when he tells her it'll be six more days she tells him SG-1 is off rotation until he gets back, that she's collected his mail, and that maybe, somewhere in his bedroom, are a pair of panties she might have been wearing in the long moments where all she gets are thoughts of him.

It's so close to something that isn't allowed, that it fires him up and he realizes, when he throws his duffel onto the next transport plane that she gave him just what he needed, enough of the heat of a fire to make sure that his head is in the right place at the right time so that she'll get another phone call from an occasionally selfish almost-lover as soon as the next mission is done.

He slides his sunglasses onto his face - the same ones she wore once when speeding across a desert - and climbs aboard the transport. He's always liked Europe this time of year.


End file.
